Also this week...

JLA/HITMAN #1 - Garth Ennis and John McCrea revisit their 1990s Hitman series in this two-issue miniseries.  One of the great mysteries of comics is why DC haven't reprinted Hitman, which was an absolutely fantastic comic.  It also ended with the death of the lead character, so this is a flashback story in which the JLA reluctantly enlist Tommy Monaghan to help them with a threat connected to his origin story.  Superheroes tended to get a bit of a kicking when they showed up in Hitman, but for the most part Ennis is taking the JLA seriously here.  He doesn't need to send them up; there's enough comedy just in saddling them with Tommy and letting them react in character.  It's not quite up there with the heights of the original title, but it's still good stuff.  A-

PENANCE: RELENTLESS #1 - Paul Jenkins returns to his reinvention of Speedball and still seems to be trying to take him seriously.  It's hard to know quite what Warren Ellis thinks of him; his approach to the character in Thunderbolts seems to be to politely ignore him and hope he goes away.  As you'd expect, it's more hand-wringing nonsense, completely lacking in any apparent awareness of its own absurdity, and desperate to be taken Very Seriously Indeed.  I still can't quite get my head around the fact that somebody really though this was a good idea.  C-

STREETS OF GLORY #1 - Just to prove that they can't all be winners, this is a rather lacklustre western by Garth Ennis and Mike Wolfer.  It's published by Avatar, which means that Ennis gets to write scenes where people have their faces shot off.  Unfortunately, other than take advantage of that opportunity, there's not much else to this story.  And while Wolfer's art is mainly competent, there are a couple of glaring howlers - most notably a splash page where a catastrophic confusion of scale results in the lead character appearing as a 200 foot giant.  Even at his worst, Ennis is at least average, and you couldn't say this was bad, but it's nowhere near the standards we all know he's capable of.  B-

WOLVERINE: ORIGINS #17 - The second part of a flashback story with Wolverine and Captain America in World War II.  And by the way, guys, the USA didn't declare war on Germany.  It was the other way round.  Actually, this is one of the better issues from this series, at least in the second half when it de-emphasises the conspiracy nonsense and gets down to the somewhat more interesting business of Wolverine and Nick Fury hunting for a downed plane.  There are moments of good writing in this issue, but ironically, they're all in the parts that have nothing to do with the title's misconceived uberplot.  B

There's more from me at If Destroyed, and if you're desperate for more Article 10 columns, you can always hunt through the archives on Ninth Art.

Next week, X-Men #203 has more of the Marauders, while Beast and Iceman go on a road trip in X-Men: First Class #4.  And Deadpool dresses up as Captain America in Cable & Deadpool #45.

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